As a child of the 1960s growing up in Canton, Ohio, Kimberlé Crenshaw says she was encouraged, as early as the age of five, to discuss “interesting things” that she “observed in the world that day” at the dinner table with her parents, who were both teachers.
That prepared her for things to come.
“I gave my first speech when I was about 9 or 10 and Martin Luther King was assassinated,” she recalls. “Black activists took us to the church from school to talk about Dr. King’s life and legacy. They asked us if anyone wanted to speak about Dr. King, and we all just sat there, then I got up. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I knew something would come to me.”
And it did. By the time she got home, word of her eloquence had spread to her parents, and they were proud of her rave reviews. “But it was bittersweet because they were so bereft,” she says. “I had never seen my father cry, and he was crying full on, just crying. So I knew that this [King’s assassination] was a life-changing moment for us as a people,” Crenshaw explains.
The early training to “observe what was happening in the world and to discuss it,” was the basis of her career choices. Her education — Cornell University undergrad, Harvard Law School and a master’s of law from the from the University of Wisconsin — prepared her to tackle social justice issues and to become one of the leading scholars and activists on civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, racism and the law.
She famously coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe how race, gender, class and other individual characteristics intersect, when she published an article titled, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” in the University of Chicago Legal Forum. The paper focused on three legal cases that involved both racial discrimination and sex discrimination. Crenshaw posited that Black women, being both Black and female, are subject to both forms of discrimination, possibly even at the same time.
“Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to White women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men,” Crenshaw wrote. “Yet often they experience double-discrimination — the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women, not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women.”
